Course enrollment windows have been postponed after an issue with ACES this morning caused problems with registration for seniors.
Many seniors found that they were either not able to register for Spring semester courses this morning or had to wait several hours before being to register. Emails were sent to the student body later in the day explaining that today's course registrations will be deleted and the senior registration window will be redone Nov. 10. Registration windows for other undergraduates will be pushed back by two weekdays. According to the emails, the problems with ACES were caused by a student-written program designed to allow automatic course registration.
“There was no intention to cause any sort of problem like this,” said senior Matthew Roy, who created the auto-registration program. “All [the program] is doing is exactly the same thing that people do. It’s clicking the buttons.”
All seniors are assigned the same registration window and go before other undergraduate students. Juniors, sophomores and freshmen are each broken into three windows within their respective years that register on separate days.
University Registrar Bruce Cunningham said that Duke has always had a contingency plan in place in the event that system issues create an unfair situation for some students.
"We spent a long time yesterday discussing alternatives and trying to determine if we could address issues on an individual student basis, but that would really be impossible to do," Cunningham wrote in an email Friday. "Once we determined the scope of the problem we decided the best, and fairest, course of action was to start the process over, giving everyone a fair shot at classes."
Roy’s program—which he made available to classmates through Facebook—was designed to automatically replicate the actions that a student would take to sign up for courses. Roy explained that the program receives a student’s username and password and then repeatedly attempts to enroll the student in their selected classes with a 30 to 40 second delay between attempts. Roy said that he specifically designed the program to be slow enough so that it would not put too much of a burden on ACES.
“It has a fair amount of delay in it.” Roy said. “It waits for the page to load fully before clicking the next button.”
According to the emails sent to students by the registrar’s office, the program “created an overload on the system, causing the outages.”
Roy said that he believed ACES was slowed down enough near the start of the registration window that even the long delays built into his program were not enough to stop a backlog of registration attempts from building up.
“I think that there was a huge spike right exactly at 7 because there were maybe over 100 people using the program. Usually it might be spread out over 7:01, 7:02 and 7:03,” Roy explained. “That lag built up into a cascade.”
As a result, a few people using the program were able to register for courses but many others faced issues. Cunningham said it could not be determined exactly how many students faced issues as a result of the program, though he noted that his office received several calls when the problems began.
Roy explained that he has used the auto-registration program himself since he developed it during his sophomore year and has never faced any issues with it. He said that he had no intention of causing an outage and was sorry that seniors faced issues during registration. He said that he has not been contacted by the administration about his program at this point.
“I felt like this was a useful tool that might make people’s lives easier, so I made it public. I didn’t intend to create any sort of problem like this,” Roy said. “I just want to say that I’m really sorry.”
The problems caused by the auto-registration program may also point to underlying issues with the registration process and with ACES, Roy said. Students have raised complaints about the system's slow speed and other issues during registration in the past.
Cunningham noted that ACES is carefully monitored during registration, adding that the Office of Information Technology continues to fine-tune the system to avoid any possible future problems.
Going forward, seniors will have their bookbags restored tomorrow afternoon to what they were as of 6:30 a.m. this morning, according to the emails sent by the registrar’s office. Permission numbers used by seniors will also be restored, although seniors will have to revalidate their schedules.
This story was updated Friday, Nov. 7 to include information from Bruce Cunningham.
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